Ian Cowie was named Consumer Affairs Journalist of the Year in the
London Press Club Awards 2012. He has been head of personal finance at
Telegraph Media Group since 2008, having been personal finance editor
since 1989. He joined the paper in 1986. He is @iancowie on Twitter.

Never mind what he said before about the importance of preserving the triple-A rating of Her Majesty’s Government, he seemed to say, it doesn’t really matter now – and, in any case, it is all the fault of the previous management.

No, the truth was worse than that. This desperate duo’s increasingly frantic attempts to appear calm recalled two earlier politicians who found themselves in similar predicaments. Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, who responded to the 1979 slump in sterling with the words: “Crisis, what crisis?” and Prime Minister Harold Wilson who promised the public in 1967 that devaluation would not affect “the pound in your pocket or purse”.

Sadly, now – as then – there is nothing theoretical about the impact on our wealth of weaker sterling. Back in the Sixties, fewer Britons than today travelled abroad regularly or filled their homes with foreign goods. But they soon felt the 14pc devaluation that prompted Wilson’s pipe-puffing bromide. Everything from overseas became more expensive.

Germans then Japanese and, more recently, Russians became noticeably wealthier than us on foreign holidays or business trips. Britain became poorer, relative to the rest of the world. While it took several centuries for Rome to turn into the convivial joke that Italy is today, it took just a few decades of stealthily shrinking the pound for Great Britain to turn into little Britain.

Earlier this week, sterling slipped to a two-and-a-half-year low against a basket of currencies. That reflected the money markets’ first chance to react to Moody’s after-hours downgrade of gilt-edged stock. While nobody expects the British Government to default in nominal terms on its promise to pay giltholders, the penny has finally dropped that – at current valuations – these bonds are almost certain to lead to losses in real terms.

Worse still, if interest rates are forced up – for example, to defend sterling – then gilt prices will fall because the fixed income they provide will become relatively less valuable. So gilts have gone from offering a risk-free return to a return-free risk.

This demonstrates the fact that there is no need for investors to suffer sterling’s devaluation in silence. Indeed, a little Englander approach to investment in the current environment is likely to prove an expensive mistake. It also illustrates the widely overlooked fact that defined contribution or money purchase company pensions have an important advantage over defined benefit or final salary schemes.

Subject to individual scheme rules, that means millions of company pension savers can make their own mind up about economic trends. More importantly, they can allocate substantial assets in line with what they expect to happen next; not just in terms of bond and share prices but also about the pound.

This would be a good point to emphasise that I am not recommending anyone to take the extreme asset reallocation I did. Nor am I posing as some sort of Mystic Meg of the Markets. Remember, there are only two types of expert when it comes to financial predictions; those who don’t know and those who don’t know they don’t know.

Here and now, you might very well ask how I am getting on with my asset allocation switch. As reported in this space last month, after the biggest rise in January the FTSE 100 has seen since 1989, I sold shares equivalent to the gain to hold 9pc of the fund in cash.

This may not sound like much but, because the fund has built up over 26 years, that locked in profits equal to one year’s net salary. The idea is for the cash to be ready to reinvest if the widely-predicted stock market setback occurs. Meanwhile, the remainder of the fund remains 50pc invested in British shares, 40pc in developed economies overseas and 10pc in emerging markets.

Since the switch went through on December 17, the FTSE 100 now stands nearly 6pc higher but my pension is more than 10pc up. Not bad in less than three months. Let’s hope it lasts.

Never mind Eastleigh, which may prove just another mid-term humiliation. Financial affairs are the point at which politics condenses into something more substantial than hot air and hits you in the pocket.

So, amid all the macroeconomic doom and gloom it is encouraging to consider that individual savers are not powerless to do something about it. That makes a refreshing and empowering change from all those dreary surveys telling us we are going to die in poverty.

On the contrary, many people who do not even bother to read their pension fund annual statements might discover, if they did, that the tools are at hand to shape their own financial future. That’s got to be a better bet than relying on politicians’ promises.